Opera
Robert Beale
For 50 years Clonter Opera, the song-on-the-farm project in rural Cheshire, has been encouraging would-be opera stars by giving them a chance to perform in undemanding conditions under the guidance of experienced professional.It all began with audiences sitting on straw bales in a barn, and only after a purpose-built theatre came into being was there a small pit enabling something more than piano accompaniment for major productions.To celebrate the anniversary, they’ve done something very different from the more-or-less complete opera productions that were often a highlight of high summer in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Could “Cav and Pag” give way to “Sue and Pag”? As a double-bill partner for Leoncavallo’s backstage shocker Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park have scheduled not the standard Cavalleria Rusticana but an entirely different one-act work. Premiered in Munich in 1909, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna plays droll, even farcical, variations on the same theme of male jealousy as newlywed Count Gil suspects his bride Countess Susanna of having an affair. But the whiff of tobacco she brings into the lavish Art Deco apartment turns out to derive from her own cigarettes. The reconciled couple Read more ...
Lucia Lucas
Until last week, Tippett’s New Year had not been staged since 1990, probably because it’s considered very hard to produce. I think it is generally harder than Britten. It’s also an ensemble piece; you need 10 people who are fairly accomplished in performing new works.There are parts that needed to be updated. Some of the libretto, seen through our lens of 2024, seemed insensitive. You can’t sanitise everything and take the drama out of the story, but it was important to update, with the blessing of Tippett’s estate.When we first started, everyone was simply trying to do it right, but it was Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival offers one thundering success, one uneasy compromise and one surprisingly enjoyable experience, in its three mainstage operas this year.Verdi’s Ernani is the thundering success. For the first time in years, the festival has the Orchestra of Opera North in the pit at Buxton Opera House, under artistic director Adrian Kelly’s hand, and the size of its string section and richness of its sound (with cimbasso underpinning the brass) are there from the moment the overture starts. The festival chorus – 24 of them if you count in the minor roles some members take – are Read more ...
First Person: Katharina Kastening on directing slimline Bizet in a year rich in 'Carmen' productions
Katharina Kastening
Peter Brook's reimagining of Bizet's Carmen condenses the scale of the original into a more intimate theatrical experience. The score has been starkly cut, the orchestra reduced, and only four singing roles remain: Carmen, Don José, Escamillo and Micaëla. There are also three speaking roles: Zuniga, Lillas Pastia and Garcia (Carmen's husband). In Bizet's opera, Lillas Pastia is only briefly portrayed, and Brook incorporates Garcia, who does not appear in the opera, from the original story – Merimée's novella Carmen.As Brook uses Bizet's music, it is only natural to think of the original Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Academy of Ancient Music, which celebrates its “golden anniversary” this season, got going just as Handel’s operas began to leave the library at last and reclaim the stage. There they continue to flourish, dazzle and move – which makes any concert performance of them a slightly bittersweet pleasure.At the Barbican, the AAM’s Orlando boasted sumptuous luxury casting, headed by countertenor Iestyn Davies as the love-maddened warrior, and adorned by four other hugely gifted singers along with the savoury period sounds produced by director-harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and his crew. Read more ...
David Nice
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties.This time the house’s brilliant director of Strauss masterpieces, Bruno Ravella, who worked as assistant to Cox at the old Garsington in 2005, has been called in to fine-tune a rather wonderful cast, with relative youthfulness among the leads, and serves up a blissful Mozart evening totally in tune with the environment, Read more ...
David Nice
How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s most consistently inspired opera live before, but I wonder if every single number can ever have been applauded, as it was last night.Less than a month ago, Ireland’s Blackwater Valley Opera Festival also flourished a Cesare, a much more heavily cut version but strongly cast and just about as good as it could be on a limited budget and rehearsal Read more ...
David Nice
What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kalište and the city of his youth, Jihlava; the Polička tower where Martinů was born; and finally the Litomyšl brewery which was Smetana’s first home (further east, Janáček and Freud were born six kilometres apart).Unquestionably Litomyšl is the loveliest of the four places, with an elongated square flanked by arcaded buildings – one day they’ll remove the parking spaces – below the UNESCO listed Renaissance castle (lavish restoration ongoing, so courtyard Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory.The company’s marvellous Death in Venice is for the time being water under the Bridge of Sighs, but now it has come up with a superb staging of Puccini’s complicated triptych of one-acters, a rarity no doubt partly because of its length and rehearsal and casting demands. Admittedly it’s a co-production with Scottish Opera and was seen in Glasgow just over a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Why would anyone want to stage a work like The Merry Widow in this day and age? Silly question. It’s the music, stupid. Of course, it’s an entertaining story and there are some good jokes. But I'd bet that if Heuberger had composed the music to this libretto, as he started doing, instead of Franz Lehár, who took it on afterwards, I wouldn't now be writing about Cal McCrystal’s new Glyndebourne production, or anyone else’s for that matter.I realise this might not be quite McCrystal’s opinion. To judge from his approach in Sussex, he sees the work as a comedy with musical attachments. Or from a Read more ...
David Nice
Recreating Handel’s Egypt with a first-rate cast on the summer opera scene could have been the exclusive domain of Glyndebourne, bringing back its revival of David McVicar’s celebrated Giulio Cesare in July. Yet over the Irish sea, in the grounds of a castle with exquisite gardens above the lushly wooded valley of the river Blackwater, they’ve pulled it off. This is a singular triumph of which Caesar would be proud.Modest budgeting means a spare but effective and unfussy production from Tom Creed which brings out the best in everyone, and the Irish Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, no Read more ...